


Neon Nights

by Imnotfallen



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adventure, Angels, Demons, F/M, Love, M/M, Romance, happiness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-13
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-08 15:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imnotfallen/pseuds/Imnotfallen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time a little girl saw an angel. Once upon a much-later time that angel fell from heaven and landed at her feet. The next day she finds herself driving to god-knows-where taking a couple of scenic detours to such charming locations as hell on the way, all in the name of re-uniting the angel with the man he thinks he might love. Not that the angel ever told the man that. Not that the man ever told the angel either. This story is not about breaking the rules, though it is and this story is not about changing your mind, though it is. This is a story about finding out who you are and hating it and about getting what you want and finding out whether you want it so much after all. This is not a love story (though it really is).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Neon Nights

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone so this is my first story here, it's an idea I've been toying with for a while but I have really no idea if it's any good at all..let me know what you think?

Prologue

House rules

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

I miss it all   
from the love to the lightning   
and the lack of it snaps me in two.  
Just give me a sign there’s an end and not beginning   
to the quiet chaos driving me mad.   
The long neon nights  
and the want of the ocean   
and the fire that is starting to go out.

\- Snow patrol 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Want number one  
(But baby I am clutching at straws)

 

Hunters aren’t really meant to believe in angels.

Things of the dark, things that lurk and stalk and hunt and savage, those are fine, those you can believe in however you like. But angels are just ever-so-slightly off limit. Because an angel breaks every rule and crosses every line, because an angel is a killer just like a vampire is a killer and an angel breathes in other people’s – other humans – oxygen, bleeds their blood, wears their skin like a shirt just like any other demon does. An angel is what every hunter has been trained to hate. And yet an angel comes from God so an angel must, ultimately, be good. And that makes hunters ask questions and that makes hunters have doubts and that makes hunters…suspicious. Because if an angel is a killer like a demon is a killer, can a demon be good like an angel be good?

Castiel was the first angel Dean ever saw. 

Dean never thought about the things he killed. He carried the weight of too many lives already, the lives he wasn’t to blame for and the lives that maybe he was to blame for because he might’ve saved them but he couldn’t. They plummeted like rocks to the pit of his stomach and the weight made him sink a little more every day. But the rest of them, the lives he split in two, if you could call them lives at all? He turned them over in his mind once and then cast them aside. Dean Winchester was never one to question things. 

“Dammit Cas.”

“Dammit Cas.”

“DAMMIT CAS!”

Dean didn’t want to admit he needed Cas.

Dean had never in his life needed anything except a gun in his hands and the road stretching itself to infinity underneath the impalas wheels and his brother in the seat next to him. 

Never wanted anything more. 

Well. Except a moment to close his eyes to sleep and not feel terrified that someone would snatch Sammy in the dark. Except someone else to hold the world on their back for a second – just one second – so Dean could crumple to his knees and rack his brain for any moment he could remember that felt like something that wasn’t pain. Except someone to notice that his hands were shaking more and more every day. Someone to whisper at three am that it was going to be ok eventually because Dean was getting sick of the sound of his own voice. Someone to still the clock for him, just for a heartbeat, because the older he got the more scared he was that he would become an old man, that he would wither into oblivion, without ever having felt young, felt alive. A heartbeat of happiness would be better than nothing, even if he knew having it ripped away from him would make him wish he had no heart in his chest at all.

There’s an awfully long list of all the different kinds of want.

These were the things that Dean Winchester wanted. And they were want number 1 – the wants we don’t know that we have. The wants we don’t want to know that we have. 

Hunters aren’t meant to believe in angels. 

In that case they’re most certainly not meant to want them. 

It was a gradual thing, the wanting. Not all wants are. It filled Dean slowly, drip by drip until he was full to the brim with it and he still didn’t know. He couldn’t put a name to the want, just like he couldn’t put a name to any of the wants. He just knew, like with all the others, that if he could just have Cas, just for a second, the world could burn to pieces and for the first time Dean would find a way not to feel guilty about it. 

Castiel was the first angel Dean ever saw.

The angel that dragged him from perdition.

The one that raised him up.

And then he was the one that fell. 

Want number two  
(Say something I’m giving up on you)

Little girls aren’t meant to see angels. 

Well, nobody’s meant to see angels are they? Seeing angels makes you mad, makes every word that drips out of your mouth slippery and worrying and…dangerous. Seeing angels makes people worry about the dark spaces inside your head and what’s written there, about the cracks in your brain and what they might mean. 

Even angels know they’re not meant to be seen. 

And yet she saw him, saw the angel Castiel in the sepia light of a hospital hallway. At least, she thought she did. She looked up for a second, for a shard of a heartbeat. She looked down and her father wasn’t breathing. She was five that time. 

She saw him when she was ten and her very first foster parent knocked out her two front teeth. She saw them, lying there on the carpet, sickening with blood and yet still so very, very white and she fainted. But even as her eyes were gluing themselves shut she saw that hint of darkness, that faint, fleeting glimpse of a wing. 

She saw him just before she had her first kiss, from foster parent number five.

And again when she had the first kiss she’d ever asked for from a boy named Trev who was scared and shivering and ultimately, tragically, far too nice to her. 

She saw him the first time she shot heroin like fire into her veins and she thought the sudden flash of warmth, of bravery, of…safety must be the drug talking. 

She saw him seven times one January, all preceding one of her sporadic, desperate, spinning sensations that maybe she should get clean. 

She never saw him on those days when she inevitably failed. 

She saw him exactly eighty-four times between the ages of five and eighteen and every single time she thought she was going mad. Except…there were a million and five other things – the howling ghosts on the ceiling that kept her from falling asleep and the voice in her head that always sounded just like her father and the occasional clawing, agonizing fear that she didn’t quite fit into her body the way she was supposed to – that made her feel the exact same thing so she had never known how she was supposed to feel about her occasional angel. Mostly she didn’t feel a thing.

Or she told herself she didn’t. 

You see she was suffering from want number two – the want you can feel burning a hole in your stomach. You just don’t know yet what it is you want.

Little girls aren’t meant to see angels.

Humans aren’t meant to see angels unless the angel wants to be seen.

And yet she did. 

She saw and she believed. 

She saw him eighty-four times.

And then she saw him fall. 

Want number three   
(The quiet chaos driving me mad)

Angels aren’t supposed to think about humans. Not more than they have to anyway. 

It was sort of like a house rule.

Angels are different. 

Angels keep to their own. 

Castiel was the exception. 

Because Castiel thought about humans, so many different humans, until his brains tied themselves into knots and threatened to choke him in the dark.

He thought about the girl, the girl who shouldn’t be able to see him but could. A hard, cold, caricature of a girl really, as far as Castiel was concerned. He didn’t even know her name. 

Thirteen years and no name. 

An improbable girl by all accounts. A girl who should not have survived for as long as she had.

Castiel thought he might care about her. 

Castiel knew he cared about Dean.

Dean was the human he thought about the most. 

Dean Winchester who killed the monsters that lurked in the dark but couldn’t kill the ones that sang him into nightmares every night.

Cas wanted to kill those mind-monsters, those dreamed up demons, throttle them one by one until the red would never wash off his hands. He knew he shouldn’t want those things.

Angels aren’t supposed to want anything at all. 

Castiel wanted so much he was sure all the wanting must leave some kind of mark; a scar or a burn or an exit wound – something to show for that feeling he had all the time, like there was too much inside to fit in one person, like some of it was going to start leaking out. He searched his skin for it, ogled every last inch of himself for something – anything that would give him away. He could not give himself away.

Needless to say there was nothing there, nothing to show that his mind was like a broken record player, stuttering over and over and over again on the same thoughts – to talk to the girl, to take care of her, to stop her from ripping herself apart, to find out why she could see him, to apologize, to do anything he could to change the fact that he had driven her mad – he was so sure he had driven her mad, to bring back the dead whose heartbeats he could still feel shuddering through his skin, to raise from the ashes the brothers he had lost.

And Dean. Dean and Dean and Dean. Always Dean.   
All these were classic cases of want number three – a want you know as intimately as your own skin or the eyes that keep you awake at night. A want you know so well you’ve stopped even trying to pretend you can ever have it. 

Castiel was not supposed to want. Just as Hunters were not supposed to believe and little girls were not supposed to see. 

Castiel was not supposed to get close.

And then he fell.

**Author's Note:**

> So..umm..I have absolutely no idea if it's any good whatsoever...let me know?


End file.
